Gun in Cheek (12 page)

"I'll prove it, if you like," I said determinedly. "Give me a cracker, and I'll break it with my bare hands!"

"There has to be
 
more interesting way of proving it," she said throatily.
 
"Like, if I took you upstairs to my room, as soon as we've finished this drink?"

I shook my head regretfully. "I'm not allowed to make love to any suspect in a homicide case. It's a rule." (
Burden of Guilt
)

Wheeler doesn't spend all his time dealing, or trying to deal, with sex. He does attend to business now and then:

"Yes?" The word exploded out of him like I had just punched him in the solar plexus.

"I'm Lieutenant Wheeler, from the sheriff's office," I told him.

"Only a lieutenant?" He sounded bitterly disappointed. "Is that the best they could do?"

"This is Pine City County," I snarled, "and here, with a homicide, you get me. If you don't like the idea, you can always take your corpse someplace else and start over." (
Burden of Guilt
)

"Haven't found your murderer yet?" she asked.

"I was just figuring," I said. "Maybe it's an inside job, one of those least-probable-suspect capers. You get around much in a sarong, carrying a blowpipe in your dainty little hand?"

"Maybe it's high fashion
 
in Waikiki," she said

sweetly, "but in li'l ole Virginny where I come from,

they'd figure right off a girl was ailing and feed her hot molasses until she started wearing white cotton dresses again."

"They could blame it on the hot sun," I said absently. "The sudden heat—hey! That gives me an idea!"

"Hang onto it quick, honey-chile," she said excitedly. "With you, this doesn't happen very often."

"I'm going to make like that li'l ole sun," I said, "and turn on some heat." (
The Brazen
)

"I keep on getting this recurring symptom," I said, "every time I listen to you run off at the mouth. It starts with a feeling of great restlessness and impatience. After awhile . . . comes this almost irresistible impulse to smack you in the mouth. You figure I'm sickening for something?"

"Moronic egotisis," he said promptly. "It's a common disease among morons such as yourself. . .

"How come you're a doctor and still know nothing?" I asked in a wondering voice.

"It wasn't easy," he said. "For the first three years I kept on wondering why everybody figured I was a chiropodist, then I realized I'd hung my shingle upside-down."

"When can you do the autopsy?" I asked, because I know when I'm licked.

"Later this morning," he said. "It looks like a nice day for it."

"You ever look in a mirror and find you're not there?" I muttered.

"And I drink Bloody Marys, with real blood," he said happily. "It's a fun profession, medicine. . .

"So why don't you just flap your wings and fly away?" I suggested. (
Wheeler Fortune
)

Wheeler isn't exactly a lone-wolf cop, nor does he do all his bantering with women, male suspects, and coroners. He is forever at odds with Sheriff Layers, his superior, who doesn't care for Wheeler's decorum. And in his early capers, he is forever exchanging quips with a sometime partner named Sergeant Polnik, who just may be the stupidest cop in the history of the roman policier. (Yates must have felt sorry for poor dumb Polnik along about 1970; in
Burden of Guilt
, published that year, he mercifully killed him off.)

Here is a typical Wheeler/Polnik exchange from a 1963 novel:

"Since when did you get around to using all those two-syllable words?"

"So that's what they were?" he said in a respectful voice. "I didn't know, even, the doctor was talking dirty." He edged closer toward me and lowered his voice to a confidential roar. "Say, Lieutenant? What does that 'gamut' mean, exactly?"

"I'd like to explain but I don't think you're old en,geant," I said quickly. . . .

"Lieutenant, how come you know what it means and you got to be at least ten years younger than me?"

"I had a lousy home life," I said. . . . "I want you to stay here, Sergeant. Check the guards on the gate. Find out who was on duty through the night and if they heard or saw anything unusual. Then check the records on Nina Ross. . . ."

"Sure, Lieutenant." The muscles in his jaw stiffened dutifully. "I got just one question. Who is Nina Ross?"

"The girl who was murdered!" I tried hard but I couldn't keep a note of shrill hysteria out of my voice.

"Cheez! You sure had me worried there, Lieutenant. I figured it was maybe the nurse at the reception desk. You know, the old bat who figured 'nut' was a dirty word?"

"Well," I said desperately, "if she gets out of line you can fix her real good—just say 'gamut!' right in her face." (
The Girl Who Was Possessed
)

And this, finally, is Wheeler in action:

"Drop it, Lieutenant!" he said tensely.

I figured if I did drop it, it probably wouldn't make any difference, he'd still shoot me. So I didn't drop it. He pulled the trigger and a split second later the room exploded in front of my eyes.

My reflexes got to work belatedly, and I pressed the trigger of my own gun; then pressed it twice more. .

Williams still leaned against the door, but his gun was on the floor. [He] was dying, and dying fast.

I felt the top of my head and my fingers got wet. I explored cautiously and decided the slug from his gun had ploughed a furrow across the top of my scalp. Close enough to hurt, but no more than that. One inch lower, and I would have been a bad verse on a chunk of granite. (
The Victim
)

Thus Al Wheeler.

Add him up with Kethridge, Price Price, and Steve Conway, and you have a composite of the American cop as portrayed by crime writers in the United States over the past fifty-odd years. It is a composite that gives one pause to reflect.

Is it any wonder police officers tend to get upset when you ask them if they read mystery novels?

Phoenix

Norma Goold was the most beautiful corpse Allen Starke had ever beheld. When he had seen her, lithe and young and magnetically compelling, doing her number at The Gayety burlesque house a few hours previously, he had understood his friend Paul Cloud's infatuation with her. And even in death the power she had over men continued.

Paul Cloud, and his whole family with him, was drawn into the net of suspicion spread as a result of Norma's violent demise. So was Paul's fiancée, and the playboy backer of The Gayety, and an Italian gambler who had known La Goold when her name had been plain Marcella Cadorna. And before it all ended, Allen wished he had never left Kentucky's peaceful blue grass for New Orleans.

—Jacket blurb for

Death for the Lady
,

by Stewart Vanderveer, Phoenix Press

O
nce upon a time, in the kingdom of New York, there was a publishing company called Phoenix Press.

Like many others born during the Great Depression, Phoenix was a lending-library publisher, which is to say that it grew up in a very tough and competitive neighborhood and was often forced to fight for survival with other lending-library publishers—Godwin, Greenberg, Arcadia—that operated in the same ghetto. Phoenix's parentage is unknown. Perhaps it had no parentage in the conventional sense; perhaps it simply sprang from the ashes of some defunct flapper-era publisher, youthfully alive and functional, ready to do battle in the marketplace. Such is the stuff of legends and fairy tales.

But Phoenix Press was stronger and more dedicated than the other lending-library publishers, and soon it surpassed them all to become the strongest in the kingdom. Guided by the keen eyes and iron hearts of its two chief editorial wizards, Emmanuel Wartels and Alice Sachs, it produced more mysteries, Westerns, and light romances during the thirties and forties than any other house. It was surely the monarch of all lending-library publishers everywhere.

This, however, was not its greatest distinction. Rather, it is the fact that in less than twenty years, Phoenix published almost as many wonderfully bad novels as all the other publishers combined.

The reason behind this remarkable achievement was an unstinting devotion to the principles of capitalistic free enterprise. Or to put it another way, it was a matter of greed. Phoenix published a large quantity of books and yet paid absolute minimum royalties to its writers. In an article for the
Writer's
1941 Year Book, novelist and screenwriter Steve Fisher says that he received the handsome sum of $125 for all rights to his first novel,
Spend the Night
, in 1935. Rates escalated dramatically to $300 for all rights—and even to $500 for some of Phoenix's more prolific contributors—in the late thirties; where they remained for many years to come. This policy of paying rock-bottom prices allowed Phoenix to buy manuscripts that had been rejected by the major publishers and by some of the other lending-library outfits as well. And the preponderance of these manuscripts were, to put it in charitable terms, only marginally publishable by most standards. Thus, by a combination of design and accident, were so many classics given life in the kingdom.

Perhaps providentially, the reign of the Phoenix was fated to be short. It had barely reached the age of legal majorityeighteen–when rising printing costs, the paperback boom of the early fifties, and the closing of a substantial percentage of small lending-library outlets toppled the Phoenix empire into the ashes from whence it came. This is not to say that it died; it was denied the noble end of death. Instead it was consolidated with Arcadia House, one of its archrivals, under the Arcadia imprint in 1952. Even its primary editorial wizard, Alice Sachs, was absorbed in the merger and assumed command of Arcadia's line of Westerns and (increasingly fewer) mysteries until the early sixties. Ms. Sachs even managed to survive an outright sale of the firm at that time, when it underwent another metamorphosis into Lenox Hill Press; she rather amazingly continues to the time of this writing as Lenox Hill's senior editor, holding forth at the same old Phoenix address in New York City, 419 Fourth Avenue, and still buying light romance fiction. (Lenox Hill—not to be confused, incidentally, with the academic publisher of the same name—has never published a regular mystery line and abandoned its long-standing series of Westerns in 1975. Still, the company manages to survive as the last link to a vanished era and a vanished publishing kingdom—the sole heir to what was once a lending-library fortune.)

Be all of this as it may, the Phoenix legacy—and the Phoenix mystique—of the thirties and forties is still with us today: the books themselves. Even though an average of only two thousand copies of each title were printed, and most surviving books have library date stamps; card pockets; borrowers' signatures; coffee and other, stranger stains; dog-eared pages; pages defaced by scatological graffiti disguised as readers' comments; or any combination of these, copies of most titles turn up fairly often in secondhand bookstores and on mail-order book dealers' lists. As do the cheap but durable paperback reprint editions of several Phoenix titles published just prior to and during World War II by such ephemeral outfits as Atlas, Black Cat, Bleak House, Hangman's House, Tech House, and Novel Selections, Inc. (which published Mystery Novel Classic, Mystery Novel of the Month, Western Novel of the Month, Adventure Novel of the Month).

Phoenix books were surprisingly well packaged. Dust jackets sported attractive artwork, the paper was of good quality, and there were relatively few typographical errors. In their early years, they even used a distinctive colophon for their mysteries, which depicted a smiling Grim Reaper carrying a large scythe cleverly drawn so that it was also a question mark. To read irony into this by speculating that Alice Sachs and her cohorts knew just what sort of books they were unleashing on an unsuspecting public would seem to be a misinterpretation. Such matters as colophon and editorial selection appear to have been guileless.

The total number of novels to appear under the Phoenix imprint probably approaches one thousand, with a full third of those being mysteries. Not all of that third can properly be termed alternative classics; even Phoenix Press was not that awesome. But the number that do achieve classic status are quite high—and there are a great many near-misses.